Why Mortgage Lenders Are Automating This Spring

Spring, the season celebrated for new beginnings, beautiful scenery, and heaps of sunshine, is also the time of the year well-known for an influx of house hunters browsing the market to secure their ideal homes. Despite the pandemic, we have received a high number of automation requests from mortgage lenders and financial services firms as they equip themselves for an extremely digitalized, competitive housing market this season.

This particular spring home-buying season will be unprecedented as the housing market soars due to historically low mortgage rates, delayed purchases, and redefined housing expectations. Lenders fear their current operations will not be able to meet the demand and satisfy the customers’ needs for convenience during this digital environment. Slow response times in manual, monotonous tasks are no longer tolerated.  Afterall, the world has entered a phase of technological convergence which emphasizes the need for lenders to adopt latest technologies to provide personalized customer service. Financial firms with AI-powered automation workflows will be preferred due to their ability to offer customers a streamlined process for faster pre-qualification and, consequently, a competitive advantage in the uniquely digital property marketplace this spring.

In this article, we will detail a few ways in which we have been assisting lenders through our intelligent automation solution, Laiye RPA.

Loan processing: 60% of the lenders we assisted were concerned with the time-consuming nature of manual loan processing. Laiye RPA was utilized to automate processes such as ordering third party services, verifying pre-funding data, and auditing to slash the loan processing time by 40 – 50%. In addition to being beneficial to lenders, automated loan processing is also a tremendous advantage to borrowers in the time of increased competition in the property market.

Customer service: A sizeable number of financial firms reported being inundated with customer queries during this time of the year. In response, Laiye Chatbot was used to provide round-the-clock service, a terrific benefit in the mortgage sector where borrowers will frequently have questions, with many of them occurring outside of lenders’ work hours. The AI-powered bot was able to helpfully mine for information and return with useful knowledge to borrowers almost instantly. In addition to answering queries 24/7, Laiye Chatbot was also utilized to send batch emails and guide users through the loan processes, saving time for both lenders and the borrowers.

Application integration: Many firms emphasized the myriad of applications involved in mortgage processing, describing the procedures involved in manually accessing each application relevant to the borrower’s application to be painstakingly burdensome. Laiye RPA was deployed to unburden the staff from such monotony as the organizations were able to use bots to not only direct automatic downloads of necessary documents from multiple sources, but also perform a comparative analysis to scan for errors and inconsistencies to ensure maximum accuracy.

Quality control: To ensure compliance with underwriting processing rules, lenders must audit closing documentation and perform steps which require a significant amount of time while exposing lenders to compliance risks. Lenders are required to review a great deal of processes and files including legal documentation, insurance documentation, and output from third party tools. Laiye RPA conveniently reviewed and extracted data from the relevant documents and flagged issues when necessary. Moreover, lenders were able to view findings of each file in real time, enabling them to begin writing the quality control report at an earlier period compared to the traditional process whereby the staff would be unable to write the report until all documents have been reviewed.

The pandemic is driving major financial institutions and mortgage lenders to have digital transformation as the top priority this spring. Afterall, borrowers will naturally be drawn to loan officers and firms equipped with advanced technologies as opposed to those less modernized. Now is the pivotal moment for key players in the mortgage sector to embrace transformative technologies like RPA and AI as we brace ourselves to face a property market that’s truly first-of-its-kind.

About Laiye

Laiye has rich experience in RPA + AI and helps businesses and people realize their full potential by optimizing the human-machine collaborative alliance with sophisticated, dynamic, productivity-enhancing digital, low-code "workforce solutions". Laiye delivers the deepest, most advanced AI/RPA/NLP solutions to help businesses become more efficient, effective, agile, and successful. And it frees people to focus on meaningful, innovative, mission-critical initiatives.

Core technologies include robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, natural language processing (NLP), conversational intelligence, text recognition, and image recognition.